How to add revenue tracking to your tests

We believe revenue tracking shouldn’t be hard and that’s why we have tried to make it dead-simple to implement it in Visual Website Optimizer. All you need to do is this:

Create A/B, split or multivariate test

On goals page, select ‘Revenue Tracking’ as goal and enter the URL of the goal as the page where you will have access to visitor’s revenue number (it is typically available on thank you page after a successful payment / transaction)

On that thank you page, you simply need to copy-paste default VWO code and output a JavaScript variable _vis_opt_revenue with value equal to total revenue generated by the visitor. For example, if the visitor purchased 2 items (one $15 and the other $7), simply output 22 in the variable. If visitor only bought one item (say $10), output 10 only. That’s it. You don’t have to be concerned about which variation visitor saw or what individual items did the visitor bought. You just need to output total revenue and Visual Website Optimizer will take care of the rest.

For example, if the page where we redirect after successful plan purchase is http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/thank-you.php then all we need to do is to copy-paste default VWO code there and also output following code:

<script type="text/javascript">
var _vis_opt_revenue=49;
</script>

The above code snippet needs to be placed right below the VWO Tracking Code in the head tags (<head></head>) of your webpage’s source code.

If due to some reasons the revenue tracking does not work properly (ie. revenue not being tracked), replace the existing Revenue Tracking Code with the one mentioned below. This uses queue functionality (ie. it ensures that the Revenue Tracking Code is only executed after VWO Tracking Code has finished executing):

Of course, the value of revenue (49 in this case) will change dynamically depending on actual revenue generated by the visitor. If you already have revenue tracking setup with your web analytics tool (such as Google Analytics), extending it for Visual Website Optimizer should be a piece of cake. If not, just ask your IT guy, he would know where and how to output revenue for tracking. All in all, implementing revenue tracking in Visual Website Optimizer is quite simple.

Note: The value of the variable can be a float or string number. For example 42, 42.8 and “42” are all correct. Currency symbol should not be included.

How do Revenue Tracking reports look like?

Once revenue tracking is in place, you will see extensive reports like following:

As you can see, reports show you various metrics for different variations:

Revenue per visitor (the basic metric that determines performance of variation)

Total revenue

Total number of conversions (you can calculate average order value as Total Revenue / Total conversions)